Memory Distortion and the Creation of Reality

This article on Memory Distortion "reflects on a narrative by Binjamin Wilkomirski, a Holocaust survivor who vividly detailed the horrors of his childhood experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. In his memoir entitled Fragments, he recounts his earliest memories of childhood included witnessing his father being crushed to death against the wall of a house and his separation from his mother and siblings. After his liberation from the death camps, he was moved to Switzerland where he lived with a foster family. The book earned widespread critical admiration; upon reading it Jonathon Kozol raved “this stunning and austerely written work is so profoundly moving…so free from literary artifice of any kind that I wondered if I even had the right to offer it praise.” It turns out, however, that Wilkomirski was neither a Jew nor a survivor. The bases for his traumatic “memories” of Nazi horrors, whatever those may be, do not come from his own childhood experiences in a concentration camp. According to Stefan Maechler, the Swiss journalist who pursued the scandal, Bruno Dossekker— Wilkomirski birth name—never spent a day of his childhood in the hands of Nazis. Rather, young Bruno enjoyed life in peacetime Switzerland as a Swiss-born, wealthy Christian child. Even upon his exposé, Wilkomirski steadfastly professed that his account of his childhood was authentic and claimed that he had been secretly switched as a young boy with Bruno Dossekker upon his arrival in Switzerland. Liar or not, what is of interest to us in this discussion is the following: Wilkomirski's alleged experiences in German-occupied Poland closely corresponded with real events of his factual childhood in Switzerland. This is the hallmark of the “sin” of misattribution. Memory misattribution often mistakes fantasy for reality or assigns a memory to the wrong source. Wilkomirski’s case is certainly extreme, but should not invalidate the frequency of memory misattribution in our daily lives."

This "sin of misattribution" seems to be to be a rather common theme in narratives of childhood, made most famous by Marcel Proust and honed by both Bruno Schulz and Felisberto Hernández. While these authors did not go so far as to claim that their fictional childhoods were real, a challenge faced by many self-claimed "memoirists" these days, they did understand the importance of using ones personal memories to construct a different reality, a new childhood that could take over in the distorted interstices of their "real" childhood. The question is raised for me: which reality is more real, the one lived in history or the one made famous through story? When it comes down to it what makes our pasts feel true is the artifacts that are left behind, and a written account is just as much an artifact as a photograph or school records. The important thing, it seems, is what one makes of ones past in order to create a future.